Alabama

Federal agents guard a load of confiscated alcohol near the city's waterfront after a raid in the 1920s. A federal crackdown during Prohibition led to the indictment of many of Mobile's most prominent citizens. (Photo courtesy of the University of South Alabama Archives)

Editor’s note: As the Press-Register celebrates its 200th anniversary, the newspaper and AL.com are taking a decade-by-decade look at major events that shaped Mobile and Baldwin counties, the Gulf Coast and the nation during those years. Today, we look back on the years from 1920 to 1929.

The nationwide ban of the sale of alcohol did not take effect until 1920, but Alabama had approved a statewide Prohibition measure in 1909.

Mobile was practically in open revolt against both, according to historians and contemporaneous accounts. By mid-decade, federal investigators would unravel a widespread bootlegging conspiracy so uncanny in its similarity to one in the HBO Prohibition-era series “Boardwalk Empire” that it even included a local political party leader and his former sheriff brother.

Local leaders first tried a legal route to keep alcohol flowing. Mobile Mayor Patrick J. Lyons – himself, a brewery owner – led a delegation to Montgomery to oppose a statewide Prohibition bill in 1907. Bank of Mobile president N.J. McDermott wired legislators representing Mobile County that “unless anti-prohibitionists win, please give notice that Mobile is prepared to secede from the State of Alabama.”

When the national constitutional amendment came in 1919, Mobile was not any more receptive to the idea. According to historians, the city’s port made smuggling easy, and its large Catholic population proved more tolerant of the spirits than most of the rest of state, where dry counties persist into the current century.

As it did elsewhere in the country, efforts to enforce Prohibition invited violence and corruption in Mobile. The Mobile Register filled its pages with accounts of alcohol-related violence -- including the shooting deaths of two law enforcement officers and indictments against many of the most prominent citizens of the day.

Alcohol-related cop killings

The first cop killing occurred in February 1921 when sheriff’s Deputy Earl Easterling went to arrest Malcolm McLaurin on a charge of selling prohibited liquors. According to news accounts, McLaurin’s father, Dan McLaurin, got upset and came out of a store on Davis Avenue onto the sidewalk and started arguing that he was the man law officers should be arresting. After he started shouting curses, Eastering decided to do just that.

During the confrontation, Dan McLaurin pulled out a revolver and shot the deputy, according to newspaper accounts. Another deputy shot the 60-year-old, crippled gunsmith.

Taken to City Hospital, McLaurin contracted smallpox and was transferred to a city pesthouse. That is where he died, while under indictment on a murder charge.

“McLaurin, Deputy Slayer, Faces Trial Before Great Jury,” read the headline in the Mobile Register.

The second fatal shooting of a law enforcement officer also occurred on Davis Avenue, on Jan. 22, 1926.

According to a newspaper report, Campbell Starks shot a police officer outside the Pike Theatre on Davis Avenue. According to the account, Officer Chris Dean discovered a group of people drinking and began searching them. Starks later confessed to pulling a revolver and shooting the officer dead.

Justice moved much more swiftly than it does today. By June of that year, Starks hanged for the offense. It was the last legal hanging in Mobile, according to Death Penalty USA.

View full sizeFrank Boykin (on the far left) poses for a picture at this christening event for a new ship during World War I. The following decade, Boykin would go on trial as part of an epic federal crackdown on bootlegging during Prohibition. (Photo courtesy of the University of South Alabama Archives)

Those shootings aside, historians agree that Mobile authorities did not aggressively crack down on Prohibition lawbreakers. In fact, many of its most prominent citizens were implicated in a massive bootlegging operation that the feds broke up in the 1920s.

A double-deck headline at the top of the front page on Nov. 14, 1923, heralded a massive raid of warehouses, offices and disguised liquor shops known as “blind tigers.”

“U.S. MEN SWOOP DOWN IN LIQUOR TRAFFIC HERE; FORBES OF BRIG. GEN. SAWYER; WALTON HENCHMEN WERE WELL TAKEN CARE OF.”

Some 20 agents from New Orleans bolstered the show of force; the feds seized $100,000 worth of alcohol -- including 415 cases from a single Conception Street address -- and arrested 23 Mobilians, including prominent lawyer Percy Kearns. According the newspaper’s reporting, the federal government rented nearly every large truck in the city to bring seized bottles of scotch, cognac and champagne to the Federal Building downtown.

Izzy Einstein, a top Prohibition agent from New York, later told the Register that he had never seen a city with so high a proportion of “shinny joints.”

The liquor raids drew national attention, making their way onto the pages of New York Times, prompting the Register editorial page to complain that “the community has been brought into an unhappy and unenviable notoriety before the nation."

Epic court battle

But it was just the beginning of an epic battle that Mobile Bay Monthly re-told in 1993 with the help of a court file that ran more than 2,000 pages. By the time it was over, it would ensnare 71 Mobilians. The defense lists read like a roster of Mobile’s power elite, including a sheriff, a police chief and a lawyer -- Frank Boykin -- who would go on to represent southwest Alabama in Congress for decades.

The prosecutor who spearheaded it all, brought in when the U.S. attorney became embroiled in a conflict, was future U.S. senator and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

View full sizeHugo Black, shown in this 1934 photo, served as special prosecutor in a series of Prohibition-era trials in Mobile, Alabama, of some of the city's most prominent citizens. He would go on to serve in the U.S. Senate and on the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to the Mobile Monthly account and a 2001 Mobile Register profile of Boykin, the U.S. Attorney General’s Office sent four special investigators to Mobile and racked up 200 small-time Prohibition indictments.

The big fish indicted in the federal probe included Robert Holcombe, the head of the local Democratic Party machine; his brother William Holcombe, a former sheriff; the current sheriff, Paul Cazalas; Police Chief Patrick O’Shaughnessy; and Alfred Staples, president of Peoples Bank.

The Mobile-based U.S. attorney, Aubrey Boyles, was a potential witness since he had accused Boykin of trying to lure him into a protection racket to facilitate the smuggling of liquor. As a result, he had to step aside from the prosecution of the case, which is what brought Black to Mobile.

The top local prosecutor in Mobile County, Solicitor Bart B. Chamberlain, later indicted Boyles on an extortion charges that would prove to be bogus.

According to the Mobile Bay Monthly article, 44 of the defendants who were indicted went to trial. Black won convictions against Kerns, the local lawyer, and 10 other mostly middle-men defendants in a packed federal courtroom in April 1924. Kerns had been caught in the Cawthon Hotel trying to bribe a Prohibition agent, according the 2001 Register story.

Boykin proved more elusive. Black went after him three different times. He dropped charges during the first trial after the judge barred key evidence. In a second trial, Black accused Boykin and the Holcombe brothers of running a protection racket that received $5 per case to ensure bootleggers would not be raided.

That trial ended with acquittals. But the very next day, the trio went on trial again, this time on bribery charges.

This time, although jurors deadlocked on charges against Robert Holcombe, the jury convicted Boykin and William Holcombe, the former sheriff. The judge sentenced them both to two years in prison, but Black’s victory was short-lived; an appeals court overturned the convictions on grounds that the indictment lacked specificity, and Boykin never spent a day in jail.

He would go on to a long and colorful political career, and Boyles -- the U.S. attorney who had begun the whiskey wars -- would move to New York after successfully defending against an attempt to revoke his law license.